through a lens that was slightly out of focus. Flawed and distorted.
She leaned her forehead against the coolness of the glass and closed her eyes. She concentrated on breathing deeply, willing her mind to tranquility.
After a moment, far sooner than she had intended, her eyes opened. She listened, but whatever had disturbed her reverie apparently hadn’t been sound. There was no noise but the rhythmic sibilance of the waves, muted by the glass.
Whatever was out of place in her world wasn’t outside. It was within. Inside her mind. Or in her soul, perhaps. And she had no explanation for it.
She moved away from the window as the sun dipped beyond the ocean, instantly changing the quality of light in the studio. A silver arrow on the water pointed to the moon, which, hidden until now, rode low in the sky.
She lifted the cloth off her latest work and then stepped back to examine the sculpture in its entirety. Like everything else around her, the figure of the running man seemed slightly wrong, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was about the shape that bothered her.
When she’d finished work last night, she had been pleased with her progress. Now, however…
She allowed her eyes to examine each element of her creation. The runner’s torso expressed a more solid strength than the long, muscled legs, extended to their full range of motion. She reached out, intending to run her finger down the delicate delineation of the calf muscle she had been so proud of yesterday.
For some reason her hand hesitated in midair, as if reluctant to make contact. Determined to shake off tonight’s malaise by losing herself in her work—as she always could—she forced her fingers forward until their sensitive tips encountered the coolness of the clay.
As soon as they did, the figure of the runner disappeared, flickering out of sight to be replaced by the image of a pond. Leaf-shaded and dark, its stillness failed to draw her, as anything in nature normally would. It repelled instead. Frightening. Repugnant.
Deliberately, she jerked her mind away from it, blinking to destroy a picture for which she had no explanation. Her breath trembled in and out in small, audible gasps. Her fingers again hovered a centimeter away from the outstretched leg of the statue.
She closed her eyes, once more attempting to control her breathing. Attempting to remember the last time something like this had happened.
And when she did, she also remembered why she had vowed that would be the last time. There had been a reason then, of course, but as for whatever she had seen tonight…
She opened her eyes, forcing them to focus on the lines of the statue her hands had molded. Yesterday she had relished the feel of the clay beneath her fingers. The medium had become, as it sometimes did, a living force, responding to her command, but also drawing her where it wanted her to go.
Never before, however, had anything like this happened when she touched it. This, then, was the cause of the foreboding she’d felt all day. She had known something in her world had changed, but not what. Of all the possible scenarios she might have imagined to explain her unease, this would have been the last.
That was over. She had sworn it. No more.
She dropped the hand that had touched the statue, turning to retrieve the dampened cloth to place it back over the figure of the runner. Holding the fabric in both hands, she began to drop it onto the half-finished piece.
This time the image exploded on her retinas, the flash as powerful as lightning. The same pond. The same instantaneous awareness of its inherent evil.
As she watched, unable to break free from the grip of the vision, the surface of the water began to stir. Gradually, so gradually that it took her several seconds to realize what was happening, the pond took on a reddish hue.
Not the warm, vibrant color of the sunset she had watched over the ocean, but something cold and dark. Bloody and violent.
Unconsciously she opened her mouth, attempting to draw air into lungs that felt flat, as if the pressure of those black depths were closing in on her. The surface continued to churn, patterns emerging as the water roiled.
There were images there, too, she realized, but they were moving too quickly for her to focus on any one of them. Like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they merged and blended, changing even as she watched.
Everything else faded away. The night sky and the ocean. Her work, scattered on tables and pedestals around the studio. Any sense of time. Of self.
She had no idea how long it was before she realized that the patterns were repeating. Echoing one another in slightly differing versions. And that each time they did, they became more vivid. Clearer. More threatening.
She began to fight them. To struggle against the pull of the vortex at the center of the pond around which everything seemed to revolve, trying not to look into its dark heart because she knew that if she did, she would see something she didn’t want to see. Something no one was intended to see.
She would never know if she might have won that battle. Just as she had begun to despair of freeing herself from the vision, the old-fashioned chimes on her front door sounded. Rich and melodic, the notes cut through the growing sense of horror that held her captive.
She blinked, and the image disappeared to be replaced by the unfinished sculpture of the runner. The damp cloth she had held in her hands had been carefully draped over it, the folds smoothed around its shape.
She couldn’t remember doing that. She couldn’t remember anything after she had allowed the center of the cloth to touch the head of the figure.
She glanced toward the windows, surprised to find that the moon was high in the sky, the trail it left across the water now narrow and indistinct. And there was no longer any hint of crimson along the edge of the ocean.
She turned back to the runner, shrouded now by the cloth. Slowly her head moved from side to side in denial of what had just occurred.
The bell chimed again, echoing in the stillness. She wasn’t expecting a visitor. She got the occasional solicitor out here, but they never came at night.
“Coming,” she said, although there was no way anyone at the front door could hear her from back here. Certainly not that slightly tremulous whisper.
She turned, hurrying now that she had decided something must be wrong. Perhaps the vision had been a warning. A premonition of the news whoever was ringing her doorbell would bring.
Even the suggestion that there might be a logical explanation for what had just happened made her feel better. Never before had anything like that occurred without her consciously seeking it. Her “gift” had always been hers to control. Hers to use or not.
She couldn’t imagine living her life any other way. She didn’t want to think about having to.
“MAY I HELP YOU?”
Although Gardner hadn’t offered to show Ethan any photographs of the woman he’d sent him to see, there had been two small snapshots attached to the inside front cover of the file the old man had taken from his desk. Ethan had studied them, inconveniently upside down, while Gardner copied down Raine McAllister’s address.
One of the pictures had been of a freckle-nosed child, smiling broadly
